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Americanisation

When I recently learned of the push for Australia’s superannuation industry to invest in American infrastructure, alarm bells rang. Neoliberalism is still very much in economical favour so what was this really all about? When I read articles about it from Australia a little closer, I realised that they were missing the meat of the story, all that I was reading was the bare bones.

Firstly there is no $US1.5 trillion infrastructure plan as such in the 2019 budget. The Trump administration’s infrastructure plan is basically a finance deal that includes deregulation, and the privatisation of America’s state and local government assets. $US200bn is all that the American government is willing to spend including $US100bn that has been allocated to an Incentives Program. These figures however, do not include $US178bn worth of cuts to be made in the state and local government’s infrastructure budgets. They pretty much cancel each other out. The deep cuts in funding, and the need to fix their infrastructure will leave many of these government’s no choice but to look at private funding and selling off its assets.

No matter where the funding comes from, privatisation requires taking over a government function at a lower cost than the government can provide it, and to make a profit, or it wouldn’t be worth its while.

America has been undergoing privatisation since the Reagan administration through its neoliberal policies. These policies enabled private to take over energy infrastructure and utilities, but not roads, rails, ports and airports, they have mainly remained as state and local government assets. Privatisation though is not as popular as it once was due to American’s seeing and living with the consequences of privatisation; they know how it affects their lives, wallets, and their communities. In Chicago for example, parking meters were privatised 10-years ago with a 75-year lease that has cost the city $US974m in lost revenue, so far.

Privatisation in Australia under the guise of ‘asset recycling’ has been used to lobby American politicians for the last couple of years. It was introduced to Australia by former Australian Treasurer, Joe Hockey. Hockey in his current role as American Ambassador has led the charge with assistance from others, including former New South Wales Premier Mike Baird. In Australia it involved selling state assets to private to help pay for infrastructure projects, and the federal government paid an incentive payment to add to the funding. There were no big cuts or deregulation involved. The super fund’s think selling it to the American public as “workers capital” rather than private, to pay for public assets will do the trick. The super funds have even re-branded: Public Private Partnerships in America, to Pension Public Partnerships.

You might be asking yourself: ‘Why should I care where or how Australian Super is invested if it’s bringing back returns?’ That’s a good question. America has inflicted neoliberalism policies around the world for the last 40-years, this has led to the global decay of infrastructure. The global race to fix ailing infrastructure (or to gobble up what’s left of public assets), is being touted by Australia’s Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, as the answer to sustaining economic growth. Neoliberal policies are profit driven, whereas things like infrastructure maintenance are not very profitable. Hence the decline. Pretty ironic when you think about it.

Is it right or ethical for super funds to invest in a country that is also being deregulated within an inch of its life to make it easier for private with their investments? There are grave concerns for the plan to deregulate the country’s water supplies, some water utilities are already struggling to keep their water clean. Did you know that 16 million Americans get sick from dirty tap water each year? Deregulation, especially in regards to environmental restrictions designed to protect communities, will once again add to the monetary burden of cleaning it up onto the states and local governments. Even if super funds just invested in toll roads there like IFM Investors with their Indiana investment, wouldn’t it be better to invest in Australia’s infrastructure? In particular renewable energy, there’s a whole industry waiting to be untapped. Or perhaps the super funds could look to our neighbours in Asia needing infrastructure assistance, including being climate change ready. There is so much more to ethically invest in than road tolls and user charges around the world.

And on a final note, another concern that I have is if investing super into anything that makes a profit becomes the norm and accepted, what other ideas or policies that are unpalatable now, are lurking waiting for the right moment to be introduced? The privatisation of sidewalks in Australia? It’s already happening in Kansas City and Missouri.

There are only public assets (including public land), and services left to invest in or take over. If this were to happen what would the world look like? I don’t even want to imagine.

The Australian cultural mindset has been eroded and is becoming predominately American. The size of the American population and its dominance in movies, television and music meant that influence was inevitable and it’s reflected in our fashion and in language with words such as “like”, “bro” and phrases along the lines of “you go girl”. American cultural imperialism has only exacerbated since Australia signed the American free-trade-agreement (AUSFTA) in 2004. Australia is losing its cultural identity. The Indigenous Australian culture actually has more in common with Australian culture than many may realise. The love and affection for Australian land is evident when so many Australians spend their time off from work and on holidays to do such things as swimming, sun baking, surfing, yoga, meditating, mountain climbing and hiking.

Australia’s history with Indigenous Australians is also not what many may realise with slave labour, stolen wages and stolen federally paid maternity allowances and child endowments from their trusts. Indigenous Australians not only built the pastoral industry for Australia but they also helped build it in other ways with wage, labour, allowance and endowment theft. They also worked in a wide range of occupations: interpreters, concubines, trackers, troopers, servants, nursemaids, labourers, stock workers and pearl divers. What is also overlooked is that they are the oldest living culture on earth with many achievements starting to come to light such as, superfoods knowledge, being the world’s first bakers and perhaps even being responsible for the world’s oldest astronomical map.

Australian television in the eighties and nineties is markedly different today with the likes of comedy shows such as The Comedy Company, Fast Forward and Full Frontal now fond memories. The reality television show Big Brother, began on Australian screens in 2001, along with a plethora of American shows such as Sex in the City, Law and Order and CSI. Many Australians including Indigenous have been raised subconsciously or subliminally with an American belief or values system. Calls get made to the American emergency number 911 rather than our own national emergency number 000 and “product dumping” is the norm with American businesses selling their television shows in the Australian market for below local cost or production prices. With an American population of around 325 million, it’s a lot easier to recoup your production and overall costs and it means that sales to other countries are essentially pure profit for America. This makes it harder for local industry to compete and it takes away any incentive to innovate or foster local production and talent. It also creates a deficit in our creative knowledge economy preventing innovation at a local level. More funding and tax breaks are needed to bolster confidence and to transition our creative knowledge economy for the future.

Between 1996 and 2000 Australia’s royalty trade deficit (including Information and technology) with America, increased by 84 per cent. In the book How to Kill a Country by Linda Weiss, Elizabeth Thurbon and John Mathews, they suggest an Intellectual Property Right (IPR) tax. They argue that governments have always taxed property as a principal source of avenue, so why not tax royalty flows? This book was written twelve years ago so it would be even easier for the government to look at royalty flows data and to put even a modest tax on it. For example, if Australian businesses paid royalties of AU$1 billion, the government could collect say 10 per cent or AU$100 million and use the revenue to reinvest locally.

Forced control over Indigenous Australian’s wages and savings (bank books) only ended in 1972 and they didn’t receive equal wages until 1986. Despite stolen wages, slave labour and stolen benefits they have fought wars for Australia without recognition and thanked only with discrimination when they got home. They have been portrayed as nomadic, hunter-gatherers but evidence shows that they were actually Australia’s first farmers.

Grindstones that are 36,000-years-old have been discovered in New South Wales (NSW), they were used to turn seeds into flours for baking. The Gurandgi Munjie collective is made up of a number other Indigenous Australians living along the NSW south coast and in east Gippsland in Victoria. They’ve been trialling native millet, kangaroo grass and murnong crops to increase harvests and begin selling bread soon. “One of our aims is to make sure our people earn a living out of it, as well as helping Australia learn about a natural Australian diet.” Murnong – is also known as yam daisy and is a tuber that can be eaten like a vegetable, the seeds of millet and kangaroo grass make up the healthy, gluten-free flours. Pascoe of Gurandgi Munjie’s baking experiments, says: “Kangaroo grass flour has got a really beautiful smell and a nutty flavour. We love making the breads simply because it tastes so good, but also because it makes the kitchen smell good as well.” And that “Environmentally it’s a pretty good deal,” says Pascoe. “They’re perennials, so once you get your crop established you don’t have to plough the land again or add fertiliser or pesticide. Your CO2 emission levels are going to drop dramatically because you’re not turning the soil over and releasing carbon into the atmosphere.”

Marnybi, Gugbinge, Kakadu plum, bush or billygoat plums have the highest natural vitamin C content in the world and can be found in abundance in Wadeye, the Northern Territory (NT). For Indigenous Australians it’s known as traditional Indigenous medicine. A local Wadeye woman explains: “It’s good for your headache. If we have headache at bush, we eat plum and it makes us feel good.” It is considered as a gift from the Dreamtime. It has taken off commercially as a powder for smoothies and to be sprinkled on to breakfasts as well as a good source of folic acid, iron and may even protect against Alzheimer’s disease. With this success comes bio piracy which locks up intellectual property around bush foods. Bush foods’ intellectual property is already being largely exploited by companies and individuals that are patenting intellectual property of native plant knowledge. Multinationals can come in and patent the use of products with little consideration for knowledge or history. The Northern Land Council is calling for a blanket moratorium on all patents over native foods and plants until a legal framework protecting Indigenous interests can be enforced. Andrew Forrest has been making noise again recently about a “premium” Australian brand to woo China, wouldn’t it be prudent for Indigenous Australians to have their own?

Australia may be home to an ancient astronomical stone formation that could be older than Stonehenge. The Wurdi Youang stone arrangement 45km west of Melbourne was formed using 90 blocks of basalt and clearly depicts the equinox, the winter solstice and the summer solstice. The Wathaurong people are the traditional owners. Geologists and experts have estimated it to be around 10,000 years-old, or 3,000 years older than the 7,000 year-old Stonehenge. They used the sky to help them work out weather patterns too and shared this knowledge with one another through song and dance, for example, if stars are twinkling rapidly it’s because of high-altitude trade winds. Another example is if the stars are twinkling fast and are bright blue, storms are on the way. They use dreaming and songlines as memory techniques to retain vast amounts of knowledge.

Indigenous are being included and recognised as such a lot more with Acknowledgement of Country becoming the norm as well as “Welcome to Country” ceremonies. Just about daily more stories and discoveries like the ones above can be found if you look, you won’t find them often in main-stream-media, but you will find cartoonists like Bill Leak. The social media campaign that followed with #IndigenousDads to counteract the latter’s cartoon was heart warming and shows that there is good will out there for each other. The ABC television show Cleverman also helped to educate and give insight into Indigenous Australian’s culture. Personally, I still can’t get Jesse William’s speech at the Black Entertainment Awards about racism in America out of my mind. In particular the last paragraph: “We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is though… the thing is that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.”

So much of the Australia that many grew up with and know is gone, owning your own home and endless summers at the beach have been replaced with longer working hours. That is if you can get work and aren’t dealing with underemployment. Now that America and other multinationals are snapping up Indigenous bush foods and medicine patents, I think it’s time that we united and fought for our countries independence from America Inc, it’s a corporation not a country. Call out the main-stream-media misinformation, ignorance and racism when we see it and hear it. Acknowledge the ugly side of Australian history as well as all that we have in common and share this knowledge with others.